Day: January 12, 2011

[Kyle Kroskey] just finished his first Arduino project, adding web control to a slot machine. He started with an IGT S+ model which were extremely popular in Vegas and Atlantic City casinos for years, but are now being replaced with more modern versions. His grand idea was to modify the machine so that it can be controlled from a PC, then unleash a live stream so that the Internets can play.

This turned out not to be too hard, there’s just a few controls he patched the Arduino into; the button for maxing out the wager amount, and sensors that measure coin inserts and payouts. In order to keep the peace he disconnected the speaker but rerouted the audio into a PC so that it can be played over the streaming feed. This make sure it’s quiet in the room without sacrificing the online fun. The PC is running Ubuntu and controls the video feed, a screen detailing jackpot data above the machine, and facilitates passing webpage player requests to the Arduino for machine control.

[Brad Graham] enjoys building bikes. He threw together a tall bike called the SkyWalker and then shared the build details. It’s got everything you’d expect in a fixed-gear bike; a seat, pedals, steering, and two wheels. You’ll have to do a bit of climbing to get into the saddle but the incorporated ladder doubles as passenger space. [Brad] says the thing has no problem supporting up to four riders at a time. Check out the video after the break to see that the ladder and large-height steering frame make the bike easy to stop and start without leaning on something. Wow.

[Raphi Giandiulio] grew tired of designing expensive things for Texas Instruments, so he quit his job and built this organ. Now there is some back story here, [Raphi’s] dad was a professional musician and [Raphi] played trumpet through college. He is a mechanical engineer by trade and that’s where a lot of the expertise for the instrument design came from. The project and the website that documents it are very large in scope, detailing the design process (including CAD drawings), the build, and a tour of his woodshop. The instrument includes 250 pipes and took about four years to finish, concluding in 2007. We weren’t surprised to learn that [Raphi] now has a new job… building organs.

While adding an RJ-11 connector to his digital calipers [BadWolf] slipped, shorting out a pin and accidentally discovered new features. He intended to add a port for reading measurement data electronically, but after the slip-up an ‘H’ appeared on the LCD screen and the measurement was frozen at the same number. At first it seemed like he may have killed the device, but this is actually a hold function. A little bit more playing around and he discovered that a combination of button presses can also enable a fast function which speeds up the rate at which the display changes its reading. There is even a max function that only updates the display if the reading is higher than any previously displayed measurement. These are nice features which he uses by connecting a momentary push switch between two of the output pins, details we gleaned from the annotated video after the break. He doesn’t say which pins work for him, but we’d bet one of them is the ground pin on the port, and the other is one of the two data pins. Do some investigating with your own calipers and let us know what you find in the comments.